Soon after I shared on Facebook a post by Adrian Worsfold about “Saying Jesus was Wrong,” Ken Brown reposted an earlier blog entry of his about what it means to trust the Bible. At one point he writes:
To trust the Bible, then, does not mean believing it without question, but interactingwith [sic] it, questioning it, reflecting its claims off of each other and our continuing experience, but, ultimately, letting it transform us.
I wonder whether liberal/progressive Christianity could not be defined as that form of Christianity which is ready to say the same thing about Jesus: “To trust Jesus does not mean believing him without question, but interacting with him, questioning him, reflecting his claims off of each other and our continuing experience, but, ultimately, letting him transform us.”
What do others think?
Some will react in strongly negative ways to the title and the whole tenor of this post. But I would point out that there are many people who, to echo words attributed to Jesus himself in the New Testament, say “Lord, Lord” to Jesus but do not do what he says. Why or how openly and honestly disagreeing is worse than pretending to agree is not at all clear to me.
The recent article by Phil Zuckerman in the Huffington Post, with the provocative title “Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus,” provides a recent example (it is discussed on the blogs of Matthew Paul Turner and Ben Witherington as well).
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